Conflicting Language Ideologies Research Articles

Understanding Chinese international students’ language ideologies and multilingual practices in English-medium instruction programs in Germany

Analysed through the lens of language ideology, this qualitative study delved into the multilingual experiences of Chinese international students in English-medium instruction (EMI) studies in Germany. Drawing on semi-structured interview data from 16 Chinese postgraduate students in an international university, this study probed into these students’ language ideologies related to English, German, and Mandarin Chinese. Data analysis showed that their language ideologies were complex and intertwined with academic success, social integration, future employment, solidarity within ethnic groups, and widening local networks. It was also found that the participants’ multiple while often conflicting language ideologies were pivotal in shaping their investment in and usage of particular languages. The findings of this study contribute to a deeper understanding of the diversity inherent in international students’ language ideologies in EMI and have significant implications for the internationalisation of multilingual environments in higher education (HE).

Language ideologies in metaphors: Exploring L2 Saudi students’ conceptualization of language mixing as a language practice

This qualitative study aimed to examine the embedded language ideologies within L2 Saudi students’ metaphorical texts to discover their ideological perspectives about language mixing. Using language ideology as a lens of analysis, this study examined 74 metaphorical texts written by undergraduate students to determine their language ideologies. The results revealed that the students held multiple and contradictory language ideologies about language mixing. Students’ language ideologies were found to be an orientation along a language ideological continuum with one end representing the ideology of language mixing as a resource and the other reflecting the ideology of language mixing as a challenge. Some students’ language ideologies may fall somewhere in the middle of this continuum since they expressed conflicting language ideologies, perceiving language mixing as both a valuable resource and a potential challenge. Using language ideologies as a lens to evaluate students' metaphorical texts allowed the different language ideas hidden within the three basic language ideologies to be revealed. In addition, the study found that the students employed different metaphors to conceptualize language mixing, covering a wide range of areas such as food, drinks, objects, places and activities. The findings suggested that Saudi students’ metaphors and language ideologies are intertwined and mutually influence each other. This study recommends that teachers use conceptual metaphors as a reflective tool to unveil L2 students’ perspectives on academic activities and calls for further research on conceptual metaphors and language ideologies in L2 contexts.

Between Nottin’ Ill Gite and Bleckfriars – the enregisterment of Cockney in the 19th century

AbstractIn the 19th century, Cockney, the traditional working-class accent of London, underwent a significant change in how it was perceived and described. At the beginning of the 19th century the public discourse on the Cockney accent was restricted to a few linguistic shibboleths such as the interchange of /w/ and /v/ (represented in spellings such asweal,winegar, orvell) and h-dropping, and mentioned by orthoepists and orthographically reproduced by some novelists. By the end of the 19th century, detailed Cockney descriptions and depictions had emerged, leading to the social and cultural construction – theenregisterment – of the Cockney dialect. This paper documents this process by systematically analysing various types of published meta-discourse for both the linguistic forms (shibboleths) mentioned and the social meanings associated with them, especially in the form of so-called ‘characterological figures of personhood’. It further analyses conflicting language ideologies that Cockney was subject to in the 19th century, and which influenced its enregisterment process.

Slicing the onion: reflections and projections on language education policy in the Caribbean

Abstract The history of plantation slavery and European colonization in the Caribbean has left in its wake a rich and complex linguistic landscape, a colonial education structure, and a set of contradictory (creole/colonial) identities and language attitudes that make it fertile ground for a critical examination of language education policy development in the region. Using Jamaica, a former British colony as an illustrative case, this article takes a critical look at the historical and current framing and development of the multilayered “onion” that is language education policy in the Caribbean – a uniquely creole/colonial region with conflicting language ideologies. I examine the goals, actors, processes, and challenges and possibilities of LEP implementation (Nero, Shondel. 2018. Challenges of language education policy development and implementation in Creole-speaking contexts. In Jodi Crandall & Kathleen Bailey (eds.), Global perspectives on language education policies, 205–218. New York: Routledge and TIRF – The International Research Foundation), and also look ahead, recommending ways that we might craft viable 21st century education and LEP goals for the Caribbean and other former colonies around the world, given their colonial legacy and transnational present and future.

Emotions in Student Teachers’ L2 Learning Experiences: Do Language Ideologies Play a Role?

This paper reports on a qualitative study which investigated a group of student teachers’ emotions in their second language (L2) learning experiences, with particular attention to the mediating role of language ideologies. The findings revealed that the participants reported both positive emotions (enjoyment and pride) and negative emotions (anxiety, frustration and embarrassment) in their L2 learning experiences. In particular, these different emotions were found to be mediated by multiple and sometimes conflicting language ideologies, including the ideology of native-speakerism, the World Englishes ideology and the ideology of language as a tool for communication. The findings also showed that the different emotions evoked in the participants’ L2 learning experiences not only impacted on their identities as L2 learners and L2 users/communicators in divergent ways, but also shaped their goals and agentive efforts in their subsequent L2 learning. Overall, the analysis points to the complex, dynamic and reciprocal relationship between emotions, language ideologies, identities and agency in understanding the affective dimension of L2 learning in a more holistic manner. It also calls attention to the potential of incorporating reflections on L2 learning experiences in student teachers’ professional development programmes in order to enhance their emotional awareness for L2 learning and teaching.

English as an important but unfair resource: university students’ perception of English and English language education in South Korea

ABSTRACT This paper, using the case of South Korea, empirically examines how university students in EFL countries understand the neoliberal emphasis of English and EMI, and interpret and respond to different language ideologies. The findings demonstrate that many South Korean English language learners are caught up in a nexus of conflicting language ideologies influenced by the neoliberal promotion of English and the increasing socioeconomic polarization within South Korea. On the one hand, their investment in English language learning is largely driven by the belief that English is essential for their socioeconomic advancement. On the other hand, many perceive that the role of English as an important resource and a major criterion to measure one’s academic and professional abilities is not objective or fair. Finding calls for a more critical approach to understanding the adoption and implementation of EMI in higher education.

Conflicting Language Ideologies Concerning Bilingualism and Bilingual Education among Pre-Service Spanish Teachers in South Texas

ABSTRACT Language ideologies are the shared frameworks through which groups understand language and speakers (GAL; WOOLARD, 2001; WOOLARD, 1998). In educational settings, these ideologies may impact learning as teachers who adhere to ideologies favoring monolingualism may undermine students’ identities and bilingual development in favor of assimilation. Using language ideology and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) frameworks, this study investigated the presence of different language ideologies in pre-service Spanish teachers’ discourse and their positioning in face of these language ideologies. The analysis demonstrated that while pre-service Spanish teachers challenge the ideology of monolingualism and favor bilingualism, they also legitimate the ‘one language’ ideology that entails that the unity of a nation depends partly on the use of only one language.

“No-one told me it would all be in Catalan!” – narratives and language ideologies in the Latin American community at school

AbstractThis article discusses the circulation of language ideologies through conversational narrative repertoires among Latin American parents in the secondary education system in Catalonia. Data, gathered in a linguistic ethnography carried out in three secondary schools in the metropolitan area of Barcelona between 2011 and 2013, include fieldwork in the classroom and other spaces of the school in different periods of the school year, as well as narrative repertoires gathered from in-depth interviews with some of the actors (students and parents of Latin American backgrounds). We focus on conversational narrative because it has proved to be an effective methodological resource for gathering evaluative and moral stances amongst tellers. Narrative data are triangulated with observational and interactional information. Some of the findings reveal, amongst other phenomena, the coexistence of a constellation of conflicting language ideologies regarding Catalan as the language of the school.

Introduction: understanding language management and multilingualism in Malaysia

AbstractThis article introduces multilingualism in Malaysia and examines how the language management of the multilingual society there is challenged by interactions among global, regional, national, and local language orders. These orders and their interactions give rise to various language ideologies, which are struggling to maintain a hierarchy of their respective choice. From this perspective, this introductory article reviews the seven contributions in this issue and analyzes the impact of conflicting language ideologies on language policies, use, maintenance and development in families and communities in Malaysia. The analysis suggests that in Malaysia global and regional language orders have significantly influenced the national and local language orders while the national order has a relatively weak impact on the local language order. Malaysia’s diverse and sometimes conflicting language ideologies reflect the existing language orders and support them. The combination of the existing language orders and ideologies seems to be a perfect fit for unity in diversity regarding nation-building, but it is not necessarily a fit for diversity in unity in Malaysia. The lesson from the Malaysian experience is that language management and nation-building have to take full consideration of the interaction among global, regional, and national language orders within the communities involved.

Conflicting language ideologies in choral singing in Trinidad

This article investigates language ideologies and attitudes in Trinidad by looking at the context of choral singing. It is based on data that was collected through questionnaires, interviews, and observations with choral conductors, singers, and audiences. It reports that a standard language ideology that favours British English exists in this context, though the local variety of Standard English also enjoys considerable prestige. The local Creole is highly stigmatized, contrary to earlier work that claimed that it enjoyed increased prestige. The study concludes that language ideologies are not uniform within Trinidad, can evolve, and are context dependent.

Conflicting language ideologies and contradictory language practices in Singaporean multilingual families

ABSTRACTInformed by family language policy (FLP) as the theoretical framework, I illustrate in this paper how language ideologies can be incongruous and language policies can be conflicting through three multilingual families in Singapore representing three major ethnic groups – Chinese, Malay and Indian. By studying their family language audits, observing their language practices, and engaging in conversations about their language ideologies, I look at what these families do and do not do and what they claim to do and not to do. Data were collected over a period of 6 months with more than 700 minutes of recording of actual interactions. Analysis of the data reveals that language ideologies are ‘power-inflected’ and tend to become the source of educational and social tensions which in turn shape family language practices. In Singapore these tensions are illustrated by the bilingual policy recognising mother tongues (MTs) and English as official languages, and its educational policy establishing English as the medium of instruction. The view of English as having instrumental values and MTs as having cultural functions reveals that language choices and practices in family domains are value-laden in everyday interactions and explicitly negotiated and established through FLP.

Food fight: conflicting language ideologies in English and French news and social media

Although social media provide new opportunities for minority language use and communication, the extent to which they differ from mainstream news media requires more investigation. This paper addresses this issue by comparing French and English language ideologies in Canadian news media and on Twitter. These ideologies are investigated using a specific case study where an Italian restaurant owner in French-speaking Canada was challenged for using Italian words on a menu. This generated extensive media coverage and Twitter activity. A corpus-assisted discourse study sheds insight on the complex dynamics of language politics and how they play out on different media platforms. It also indicates that minoritised groups are under growing pressure to translate linguistic cultures into English and globalised, market-driven contexts.

Tromsø as a “Sámi Town”? – Language ideologies, attitudes, and debates surrounding bilingual language policies

The study focuses on local people’s expressions of attitudes and ideologies in the light of proposed Sami-Norwegian bilingual policies in their Northern Norwegian hometown. The local politicians’ plan to introduce the bilingual regulations of an “administrative area for the Sami language” in the town of Tromso encountered conflicting language ideologies and attitudes among the local population and precipitated a vivid and sometimes rude debate about identities, ethnicity, and local belonging. Focusing on the mechanisms of social evaluation vis-a-vis the Sami and Norwegian languages, the analysis of attitudes and stance-taking in texts (e.g., letters to the editor) in local newspapers reveals how writers anchor their evaluations and personal stances to the relations between the self, the recipients, and shared, ideological systems of values. Ideologies about Sami and Norwegian are mainly brought up implicitly in these relations. A large number of evaluations are expressed as judgements of other people’s behaviour, and language plays only a relatively marginal role as a target of most writers’ evaluations. The paper concludes by discussing the ideological boundaries that writers construe simultaneously with their construction of interactional bonds, and the metalinguistic contextualization of the Sami language within these debates.

The Discourse of Transition: Teachers' Language Ideologies Within Transitional Bilingual Education Programs

Transitional bilingual education (TBE), the most common form of bilingual education in the United States, is too often entrenched in a subtractive, English-dominant ideology. This article explores the conflicting language ideologies of teachers in TBE programs, posing the question, “In what way do TBE teachers' discourses reflect/reinforce and simultaneously confront/counter the ideology of the program model within which they operate?” The article draws on two datasets: interviews with 16 TBE teachers at 6 schools in a large, urban school district in Texas and participant observations; and interviews of 2 TBE teachers as they struggled to move their classrooms away from English dominance and toward a more balanced, additive bilingual space. Based on Bourdieu's conception of legitimate language and Bakhtin's conception of dialogue, the article argues that TBE teachers demonstrate a tension between their stated positive orientations toward bilingualism and the restrictive influences of what is termed the “discourse of transition” as they talk about their students, about their classrooms, and about their own decision-making in TBE programs. Essentially, teachers practicing under the structures of a TBE program struggle to simultaneously offer children a “transitional” and a “bilingual” education.

Using Yiddish: Language Ideologies, Verbal Art, and Identity among Argentine Jews

This essay focuses on the struggle among conflicting language ideologies that occurs in immigrant communities. Specifically, it analyzes verbal art performed in Spanish and Yiddish among second-generation Argentine Jews, the offspring of Eastern European Jews who emigrated to Argentina in the 1920s and 1930s. Despite the prevalence of Spanish in daily communication and the use of Hebrew as an emblematic language, Yiddish is still used in certain poetic speech forms. This analysis addresses the effects of contradictory language ideologies—hegemonic and otherwise—on the performance of verbal art and on performers' reflections about their speech forms.

“In whatever language people feel comfortable”: conflicting language ideologies in the US Southwest border

This article explores how language ideologies about monolingualism and bilingualism are reproduced and challenged by the media in a Southwestern border community in the United States. We investigate the particular ways in which these language ideologies are constructed and reconstructed through lexicogrammatical and discursive choices that evaluate and position languages and their users. Through an appraisal analysis (Martin and White, The language of evaluation: The appraisal framework in English, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) of local newspaper articles, we show how competing language ideologies are negotiated in discourse through a configuration of linguistic resources including: concession, modality, and polarity. These discursive configurations construct different evaluations of languages and their users; monolingual ideologies are associated to individual responsibility, whereas multilingual/bilingual ideologies are associated to social responsibility. The article points to the ways in which the print media in this community reproduces the dominant monolingual English-only ideology at the same time it opens up spaces for multilingual language ideologies.

"Quit Talking and Learn English!": Conflicting Language Ideologies in an ESL Classroom

This article addresses the relationship between educational theory—as manifested in particular ideologies of teaching and learning—and classroom practice. Based on an ethnographic study of English-as-a-second-language (ESL) learning at a Canadian senior public school, I outline a conflict between two language ideologies that give shape to, and are shaped by, the classroom practices of the ESL teacher, his assistants, and the students. I discuss the implications of this ideological conflict in terms of the opportunities ESL students are given, and that they create for themselves, to practice speaking English. I end by outlining how these findings can be used to shape educational policy as it relates to ESL classroom curricula in order to create a more equitable learning environment for ESL students.